The action, however, was not memorable to me. It was too seamless. I lost interest in the perfection of the film’s technical achievement, which I never doubted for a minute would be anything but complete and astonishing. I longed for just one moment where something wasn’t perfect, to remind me that humans had made this study of improvised naval success. Mostly I remember the image of Spitfire pilot Tom Hardy’s face in a CPAP mask left over from whichever of Nolan’s Batman movies he was in. When soldier Harry Styles survived it all, it was as though “the enemy” had been vanquished so that the real Styles could leave the set, fly to Los Angeles, hop in a car, and drive between palm trees singing the song from Titanic on “Carpool Karaoke.”

Chastain looks on with louche disdain while she indulges the players’ addictions and confusions and takes large amounts of cash off them

She and the film are nice to the nuns and priests who are her teachers but who are people too, with real lives and problems of their own. One of them (Lois Smith) sees right through Lady Bird. “You clearly love Sacramento,” Sister Sarah Joan tells her, in a line I had trouble imagining a real person saying. [...]

A little girl (Dafne Keen) shoplifts Pringles and what looks like a can of Four Loko Frost from a gas-station convenience store in Logan, which takes place in the year 2029. Movies have told us our future was dystopian, but it never occurred to me that things would get so bad that Four Loko would still be around a decade from now. Wolverine, by 2029, has deteriorated, too. His claws don’t retract as quickly. Working as a limo driver in a black suit and tie, he’s slower to recover from his wounds. Hugh Jackman, who also has to play a younger re-cloned Wolverine double, plays the original Logan as a Humphrey Bogart character, world-weary and disinclined to get involved.

I’m not interested in animated feature films even though I fully understand that Miyazaki is a great artist and I have been told more than once that it is in things like WALL-E and Toy Story 3 that we will locate the zeitgeist. As a child of the terrifying Watership Down era, I am surprised anew each time a Lego Batman Movie or a Coco captures the imagination of anyone I know over 12. Once, a while ago, I was walking to a two-screen movie theater down the street from me to see a French movie called Strayed. As I got closer I noticed an unexpectedly long line of adult couples waiting to buy tickets. Wow, I thought to myself, there sure are a lot of André Téchiné fans in this neighborhood. When I got to the theater I saw that Finding Nemo was playing on the other screen.

Lately the acting in TV commercials has gotten really good. The other night I saw an ad for some company that helps people get rid of timeshares they don’t want anymore and I thought, Man, that was great, really affecting. That could have been an episode of Togetherness on HBO, if that was still on. Car commercials are particularly satisfying these days. Thirty-second-long one-acts with movie-level production design and cinematography, each one is a humanist masterpiece featuring quality acting that fits right in with streaming drama. In one, a wedding party gets caught in the rain and they can’t walk to the outdoor altar so they have to jump in their mini-SUV to get there. You really get a feel for the relationships between these four people in that thirty seconds. Car manufacturers know our little victories are hard-won. Automakers just get us. In other ads, the family drama of auto insurance plays out just as insightfully.